Mr. Tom Considine:

I would say that they had. I mean, the ... there was a structure in place. It wasn't, obviously, just the board members. The Central Bank and the Financial Regulator had established a section which examined financial stability issues and brought their conclusions to the board. And the two boards came together to decide on the content of the annual stability report. So, I think when you look at the membership of the boards, I mean, including, say, you know, the Financial Regulator, there were people there with significant financial experience ... insurance, markets, banking, NTMA, and so on. So ... I mean, given my experience of boards down through the years, I wouldn't say that that was an issue. The issue was, really, how to evaluate the information that was coming. And that information included assessments by the IMF and others and, say, in 2005, the last one I was there for ... I mean, the conclusions that were reached on that were based on the belief that a lot of the increases in Irish house prices could be explained by the rapid growth in population. The large numbers of additional people who were on the labour force, in the previous ten years, it was something like 600 and ... if my memory tells me right, 650,000 or something like that. And in addition to that, salaries, wages, and so on had gone up.

And there was also a fairly widespread belief that supply and demand would eventually balance out. And particularly in, I think, the ... from, say, the start of the second quarter of 2005 up until after the summer break, there was a general view around that the property market was coming off the boil.